Onward we went, like miners drawn into unplumbed depths by the promise of sparkling jewels.

We didn't find a city. For five hours, we didn't find anything at all, except endless, identical trees. Tangled vines and towers of steaming excrement began to seem familiar, as if we were walking in circles, although I’d been checking my compass every five minutes. Our voices grew taut. Zip spat thin strands of phlegm into the undergrowth, and I wondered if his mouth had the same sulfurous taste that mine did.

Eventually we stopped for lunch.

“I wonder if Sergeant Rivers knew about this,” said Li around a mouthful of protein bar.

I thought back to the interrogation, the odd look on Rivers’ face.

“No clue,” I said. “He’s impossible to read.”

Zip balled up a wrapper and hurled it into a ravine.

“It’s the fact that he only has one eye,” said Zip. “That’s what makes it hard.”

Li scratched her nose with the back of her arm. “You guys hear how he lost the other one?”

“Nope,” said Zip.

“My dad told me,” said Li. “Apparently Rivers was on an expedition and one of the other guys got nabbed by a creeper vine.”

I’d heard this story before. I leaned back against a tree trunk and closed my eyes.

“The vine pulled him down into a cavern. Per company policy, Rivers and his remaining buddy were supposed to turn around and go back to shore, abandon the third guy. But they didn’t. Instead they rappelled down after him.”

“Uh oh,” said Zip.

“Yeah. According to my dad, they found him, but when they tried to ascend, with Rivers’ partner carrying the unconscious body, some huge reptile leapt out and snapped up both the partner and the third guy in a single bite. The partner’s line came whipping down and lashed across Rivers’ face, and that was that.”

Zip probed in his ear with a pinky finger.

“There’s definitely a moral in that story somewhere,” he said.

After lunch we went back to walking. Just when I’d begun to think that there was nothing out here, we came across a tall gray pillar in a clearing no different from the thousands of others we’d crossed.

It was the biggest structure I’d seen in the forest so far. Featureless and smooth, it was bare of hieroglyphs except for a convoluted labyrinth etched at its peak.

Beyond the obelisk, on the far side of the clearing, a trio of ants with heads the size of refrigerators wriggled in the tangled threads of a seven-story spider web.

Li crept closer to the gray structure, and I followed, keeping a wary eye on the wobbling spider web.

“You guys see that web, right?” said Zip.

I laid both palms flat against the obelisk. It was cool and damp as a stone plucked from a riverbed, and it had the same smell of earthy nothingness.

“Guys, come on,” said Zip, as a pair of bloated red spiders crept into view at the top of the web. Their titanic abdomens throbbed like human hearts.

“Gimme a lift, Tetris,” said Li, peering up at the markings on top of the obelisk. I bent, allowing her to clamber onto my shoulders.

Dazed, I watched the spiders amble down the web. Their lazy movements suggested that they’d already feasted today, and the ants were a happy surprise, like a slice of cake discovered in the fridge after a party.

Before our eyes, the larger of the two spiders grasped an ant with a few of its legs and bent in to administer a bite. At first the ant’s gyrations only intensified, but after a moment they faded to twitching, and then the ant was still.

The spider spooled greasy thread from its pointy rear and transformed the ant into a tightly-wrapped cocoon. Its companion wove a similar casket for the second ant.

As I let Li down off my shoulders, the third ant bucked and clacked its pincers. Sheer will or an act of God allowed it to tear itself free, and it tumbled fifteen feet to the ground.

Time slowed, as it had when I stood at the edge of the chasm with Hollywood.

The ant lumbered in our direction, two of its legs still stuck together with silk. Behind it, the spiders plopped onto the forest floor.

Zip dove left. Li and I flung ourselves right. The ant brushed between us and plummeted through the floor, dragging a good portion of the clearing with it. The first spider flew in after it.

Like bystanders during a bank robbery, we tried to make ourselves as small as possible.

The second spider paused at the edge of the pit. Its abdomen swelled and contracted. While it considered a descent, it noticed Li and me crouched beside the obelisk, and turned to pounce.

Li let loose with the SCAR, stitching a path of bullets from the spider’s eye-cluttered face down the length of its swollen, translucent abdomen. On the other side of the pit, Zip unloaded his handgun.

For a moment the spider wavered, four of its legs pulling it towards Li and me, the other ones reaching for Zip. It settled on us, but we were already seeking cover in a thicket of vegetation. Meanwhile, Zip emptied another magazine, and the spider wheeled to face the hail of bullets.

Zip scrambled up a tree trunk, climbing picks flashing. At full speed, the spider could have plucked him off the rough bark like a grape, but another barrage from the SCAR and my own pistol kept it off balance.

I’d never met anyone who could climb like Zip. Once I’d seen him scale a towering office building with his bare hands to impress a girl. When the spider reached the base of the tree, Zip was already twenty feet up.

Zip could have kept climbing, reached a safe height, and grapple-gunned to safety. But something, bravado or carelessness, made him step out onto a branch that hung directly over the spider. He fired six shots into its chitinous head.

This was the final insult. The spider bulled into the tree, sending shivers up the trunk, and Zip’s branch gave way with a groan--

The branch fell, crunching onto the spider’s upward-gaping maw. One of the pincers snapped off and ricocheted across the clearing like a gigantic boomerang, trailing goopy black bile.

The spider screamed.

Zip threw himself free, rolling to a stop at the edge of the pit.

Again the SCAR roared.

The spider staggered back, orange goo gushing from a dozen spouts. As it floundered away, one of its long, cruel legs lashed out in Zip’s direction, catching him full in the chest--

For a moment, Zip floated, eyes as wide and disbelieving as Junior’s had been--

Then he was gone, hurled into the abyss, and blood pumped thick and heavy through my temples.

I thought of another question, did civilizations develolp ways to traverse over the top of the canopy, like does this world have an equivalent of maritime trade and colonial empires, and in that same thought how would Columbus have discovered the americas?

Reply

Noah

9/26/2017 06:40:40 pm

Another question I thought of while typing that one, does the forest slowly encroach on the coast lines like how seas levels rise